Metro Plates

Black Population in Camden, New Jersey

Camden is a city of about 71,800 people on the New Jersey bank of the Delaware River, directly across from Philadelphia — and about 42 percent of its residents are Black, a population of roughly 30,200 people that is among the largest Black communities of any small city in the Northeast. Camden was an industrial city of shipyards, factories, and the original Campbell's soup works, and its Black population grew with the Great Migration into a city that has since passed through one of the most severe urban declines in America. Its Black community — rooted, institutionally dense, and now joined by a large Latino population — remains one of the city's two great peoples. This article profiles Camden's Black population in the census data.

Size and Share

The 2020 census counted roughly 30,200 Black residents in Camden, about 42 percent of the city, alongside a Latino population of about 55 percent — making Camden one of the few American cities where Black and Latino communities together form essentially the whole population, each with deep local roots. The city's total has fallen from a mid-century peak near 125,000, and its Black population peaked in absolute terms in the late twentieth century; the share has held in the low forties as the Latino community grew faster. Camden County around the city is about 20 percent Black, and the near suburbs — including majority-Black Lawnside, one of the oldest incorporated Black communities in the North, founded by abolitionists in the nineteenth century — extend the community beyond the city line. Camden's Black population is thus both an inner-city population and the center of a wider South Jersey Black geography.

Shipyards, Soup, and the Great Migration

Black Camden was built by industry. The New York Shipbuilding yard in South Camden employed thousands through two world wars; Campbell Soup, founded in Camden in 1869, and RCA's Victor works across the river's neighborhoods made the city a manufacturing center that drew Black Southerners north in both waves of the Great Migration. They built the city's Black institutions: churches like those along Kaighn Avenue, a Black business class, and a civic tradition that produced some of New Jersey's earliest Black officeholders — Camden was electing Black council members generations before most Northern cities. When the shipyard closed in the 1960s and the factories followed, the jobs left and the people stayed: the census's Camden is the inheritor of that asymmetry, a Black community of industrial depth whose economy was removed around it, and whose neighborhoods — North Camden, Whitman Park, Parkside — carry both the strain and the institutional memory of the industrial city.

Income, Anchors, and the Rebuilding Question

Camden's median household income is about $30,000 and roughly 34 percent of residents live in poverty — among the most pressed profiles of any city in this reference — and about 10 percent of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher. The city's modern economy is an eds-and-meds economy: Cooper University Hospital and the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, Rutgers University–Camden, Rowan University's Camden presence, and Campbell's headquarters form an anchor-institution core, much of it drawn by two decades of state tax-incentive policy that moved employers to the waterfront and downtown. For the Black population, the census records the central tension of present-day Camden: an anchor economy growing at the city's center while the neighborhoods' incomes remain at the level of the post-industrial decades. What is not in question in the data is the community's weight — 30,000 people, 42 percent of the city, the descendant population of the workers who built industrial Camden. The wider South Jersey pattern extends the community's reach. Lawnside, the abolitionist-founded borough adjoining the city, has been a self-governing Black community since the nineteenth century, and the Black populations of Pennsauken, Willingboro, and the city of Trenton up the river form a connected geography of Black South Jersey for which Camden is the historic center. The census counts some 30,200 Black Camden residents; the community they belong to, counted across the county's Black municipalities and neighborhoods, is considerably larger, and Camden remains its namesake city. Its congregations, its school families, and its civic organizations carry that history forward into the city's present in ways the tables only begin to measure.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Camden city, New Jersey Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.

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